Page 34 - Electronic Commerce

Introduction to Electronic Commerce

Category Description Example 9

Business-to-consumer (B2C) Businesses sell Walmart.com sells
products or services to merchandise to consumers
individual consumers. through its Web site.
Business-to-business (B2B) Businesses sell Grainger.com sells industrial
products or services to supplies to large and small
other businesses. businesses through its Web site.
Business processes that Businesses and other Dell Computer uses secure
support buying and organizations maintain Internet connections to share
selling activities and use information to current sales and sales
identify and evaluate forecast information with
customers, suppliers, suppliers. The suppliers can
and employees. use this information to plan
Increasingly, businesses their own production and
share this information in deliver component parts to
carefully managed ways Dell in the right quantities at
with their customers, the right time.
suppliers, employees,
and business partners.
Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) Participants in an online Consumers and businesses
marketplace can buy and trade with each other in the
sell goods to each other. eBay.com online marketplace.
Because one party is
selling, and thus acting
as a business, this book
treats C2C transactions
as part of B2C electronic
commerce. Learning
Business-to-government (B2G) Businesses sell goods or CA.gov procurement site allows
services to governments businesses to sell online to the
and government agencies. state of California. Cengage
This book treats B2G
transactions as part of
B2C electronic commerce. 2015
©
FIGURE 1-2 Electronic commerce categories

THE DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH O F
ELECTRONI C C OMMERCE
Over the thousands of years that people have engaged in commerce with one another,
they have adopted the tools and technologies that became available. For example, the
advent of sailing ships in ancient times opened new avenues of trade to buyers and sellers.
Later innovations, such as the printing press, steam engine, and telephone, have changed
the way people conduct commerce activities. The Internet has changed the way people
buy, sell, hire, and organize business activities in more ways and more rapidly than any
other technology in the history of business.

Early Electronic Commerce
Although the Web has made online shopping possible for many businesses and individuals,
in a broader sense, electronic commerce has existed for many years. Since the mid-1960s,

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